Usability Issues in GNOME

Here is a list of usability issues concerning GNOME. “Some time ago I decided to note everything that didn’t make sense to me while using Hoary/Breezy with GNOME, or what I thought could be implemented better. I found the time to go through the list again, clarifying somt things and writing some use cases where each problem applies. Some of these might seem very nitpicky, but details are important too.”

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147 Comments

2005-10-14 10:14 pm

I kinda agree with that stuff… But some of it is REALLY off the wall stuff… And some of it has nothing to do with Gnome, like, Unix/Linux file structure is complex… I THINK he is suggesting having Nautilus hide the structure much like Finder does in OS X… But I am not sure…

Some of it is right on, but I think a lot of it almost all Window environments have a lot of these issues.

2005-10-14 11:23 pm

>>…some of it has nothing to do with Gnome, like, Unix/Linux file structure is complex…

This isn’t about assigning responsibility for decisions made long ago.It is about accepting responsibllity for te product released to customers. If customers don’t like something, they aren’t going to be assuaged by being told “We didn’t do it”. If a Gnome user can’t do something, how is being told the filesystem isn’t a Gnome invention going to help him?

If the Unix filesystem stands in the way of Gnome being what should be, then the Gnome developers should change it.

If the Unix filesystem stands in the way of Gnome being what should be, then the Gnome developers should change it.

Isn’t going to happen. Abstractions to the fs layer could be created, but that’s about it. Changing the traditional file structure involves a LOT of things and distro developers are NOT going to change their layouts for accomodating a specific DE. That’s without mentioning that GNOME doesn’t run only on Linux.

Please refer to the comments section and skip the last 15 comments or so because some people started to diffamate my comments because they had no arguments to counter.

2005-10-14 10:34 pm

Ali, you must be fscking kidding.

Not only you link to a WHOLE -1 modded thread (mostly your messages) where you insult, rant, FUD and overall troll yet another news probably related to gnome. But then you say people “diffamate your comments”. Whoa, that is like saying rain “wets the sea”.

You were basically banned from this site like a year ago, and now you’re back asking for more.

How long have you been trolling about gnome now? 4, 5 years? I’m not kidding when I say you have a serious problem.

I read the post in question that you’re referring to, and firstly, it’s modded at a 0. So it wasn’t modded down like you’ve indicated, tsk tsk. I’d check that tongue for pimples m’lad.

Secondly, most of what he has said is true (at least from my experience).

Quote: “You were basically banned from this site like a year ago, and now you’re back asking for more.”

Oh, and I can see that you’re so happy with that result, aren’t you? Whatever happened to freedom of speech? If you don’t like what someone says, just lock them up (like the US government does), or just “ban” them from your site/forums/mailing lists. That’s a really good way to promote true democracy and freedom of speech. Not. As to this particular person trolling Gnome, he has a right to voice his opinion. If you do not like it, don’t read his posts. I see the same shit coming from Gnome users constantly bashing KDE – “oh it’s too cluttered”, “oh, it’s too complicated”, “oh, the icons are too gimmicky”, “oh, the license isn’t free” and so on and so on. Whilst I disagree with these sorts of comments, and reply to them as I feel, I don’t see osnews.com banning those users for “trolling” as you so succinctly put it. So, you’re being rather hypocritical my friend.

Oh, and again, get a user account. Might I make a suggestion to the osnews.com staff – do not allow anonymous comments to be modded up – only those with accounts can mod comments up/down as needed, and only those with accounts can receive moderation points (or lose them).

Gobo has packaging issues – as in no dependency management which it needs even though everything goes into their own little /usr/locals/.

I wasn’t necessarily saying to use Gobolinux, but from reading their docs they have a patch that hides the standard directories while still making them available to programs that expect the standard directory structure. Since stuff is GPL, developers should be able to use it in other projects.

2005-10-14 10:33 pm

Some of these are good suggestions, but the forum is the wrong place for them – hope the author posts to Gnome’s usability-list and files usability bugs where appropriate.

As for hidden folders and Gobolinux… Gobolinux uses a completely non-FHS simplified file hierarchy, which is a neat experiment but is probably not going to catch on among most of Gnome’s target platforms such as Ubuntu, at least not anytime soon. Something closer to the Mac OS X system is probably more likely, where the standard (BSD in that case) hierarchy is maintained, but doesn’t show up by default in most applications, and (except for the “Applications” folder) most of the default folders a user deals with are in their home directory (“Pictures” “Music” etc.). Even as Nautilus is designed right now, though, getting yourself down to / is not something likely done by accident – but maybe an inline dialog (ala Firefox) explaining what the heck you’re looking at would be useful for transitioning users.

As for hidden folders and Gobolinux… Gobolinux uses a completely non-FHS simplified file hierarchy, which is a neat experiment but is probably not going to catch on among most of Gnome’s target platforms such as Ubuntu, at least not anytime soon. Something closer to the Mac OS X system is probably more likely, where the standard (BSD in that case) hierarchy is maintained, but doesn’t show up by default in most applications, and (except for the “Applications” folder) most of the default folders a user deals with are in their home directory (“Pictures” “Music” etc.).

I agree that some of it is off the wall, but other things are just good practice. I’d really like having drag and drop to save.

2005-10-14 10:50 pm

Open location is easy and the auto complete is nice, heres why.

1. Having the location panel with nothing in it is logical because what makes you think I want the directory i’m in there?, no blank is good.

2. If I want to goto /home/john then all I do it type /h auto completes /home , /j auto completes john, i’m there.

Having a Window covering another while drag&drop is simple.

1. Drag the file and then Alt, Tab to rase the Window, then drop the file, how simple it that?, I use that method all the time.

As far as I know Alt, Tab is universal and since some of these usability issue are not gnome but all UI window managers and OS’s.

2005-10-14 11:35 pm

>>…what makes you think I want the directory i’m in there?

What makes you think a Gnome user is going to know what a directory is? The design and implementation of a GUI like Gnome should ensure that a user can execute any needed filesystem action without needing to even be aware of the existence of the underlying file structure.

>>… If I want to goto /home/john then all I do it type /h auto completes /home..

See above. You are also assuming the user knows how, and wants to, use a terminal.

>>…Alt, Tab is universal…

No, it isn’t. But, that’s beside the point. Opening a second window that perfectly overlays the first window, giving the appearance that nothing has happened, is incredibly bad design. I first noticed this a couple of releases ago. I’ve never seen another OS that does this; its continuing presence in Gnome means Gnome developers aren’t clever enough to fix it or they don’t care.

2005-10-14 11:50 pm

I’m not on about the terminal, in gnome 2.12 open non-browser mode and you can browse a location by Shift, L, thats what I was talking about. Also the new browser mode tells you where the user and he/she can move to within one click, rather then hitting back all the time.

I’ve never seen a Window “perfectly” overlay another window, since gnome keeps the window sizes you last left them in. Open a window and it auto rases above, whats to hard about not using the “on top”, on the top left window?

No GUI at the moment handles printing well. I’m looking at a couple of models, which would fix the printing issue.

I don’t know. To me, MS Windows handles printing quite well. I have a CUPS printer on my network and I can print on it with any version of Windows supporting IPP by using the Windows PCL driver for my printer. Sure, there are room for improvement. Ffor instance, the printing dialog is freaking when it cannot access my printer while I’m on the road. Furthermore, there are many applications that are using their own GUI for printing instead of the generic one. Nevertheless, it works, something I cannot say for gnome-print. Of course, that’s from my own experience.

2005-10-15 5:20 am

1. Drag the file and then Alt, Tab to rase the Window, then drop the file, how simple it that?, I use that method all the time.

I disagree, for a couple of reasons:

1. It complicates because you have to know the hotkeys in advance. I’m sure most people know alt+tab, but still.

2. You find yourself reaching for the keyboard when you’re doing mouse operations, IMO this should be avoided (for the most part) and in this case it would be easy to design it that way.

3. It’s a three step process that could be reduced to only two, the current behaviour is:

drag => alt+tab => drop (as you suggest)

when it could be

drag => drop

See my point? The less you have to do the quicker you’ll learn. I use KDE but it suffers from this very same problem (maybe it’s configurable somewhere, I don’t know). To be honest I don’t care very much because I manage just fine with the current behaviour but those concerned about usability should pay attention because tiny details like these makes working in the DE much faster and convenient (and no, “simplicity” is not the only graal out there).

It’s a problem in pretty much all desktop environments. I think Mac OS X has some sort of solution to this one (but has other drawbacks).

In windows you can also have drag it to the taskbar, and let the mouse hover over the taskbar-button the folder/application you want to dump the objects in. When the window opens (immediately or after 400 milliseconds or whatever settings you have) drop the object(s). I have to test this solution in Gnome and Equinox.

” Suggestion: Create an infrastructure separating data, configuration and temporary/cache files. This will also allow to delete the gnome configuration if it becomes corrupted without data loss.”

I’d be on board for this one… A /conf/$USER would be AWESOME. However, implementing it would involve waiting for programs to move over to some new env variable… Which, I’d happily do the day someone started doing it, but old applications would still make dot directories until they get fixed or no longer used.

So, it’d be slow to start. I do wonder why no one has bothered to do it yet…

2005-10-15 1:11 am

This area has already been covered by freedesktop.org

The proposed solution is to have a .config directory in each user’s home where all of the other applications can store their settings

No, that’s a bad idea. It doesn’t allow seperation via partitioning. /conf would be highly preferable as it would allow you to seperate them out. You see, it’s nice to put your data under /home and never backup when ya switch dists, but those dot directories are a pain in the arse every time!

Please refer to the comments section and skip the last 15 comments or so because some people started to diffamate me and my comments because they had no arguments to counter. As this has been moderated down two times without any reasons + namecalling, I allow myself to repost it again. It’s cheaper than wasting modpoints Looks like truth hurts for some people and that they want to prevent attentive readers from reading above linked comments section

2005-10-14 11:20 pm

Tango has got to be the simplest and clean iconset i’ve seen and i’ve seen very few people come up with icons that look great small. Gnome’s icon set is good because they dont look like kindergarden icons i.e Crystal and XP, just look at the firefox icons which are rather like Tango and gnome. People act like it’s a HUGE with problem with gnome, when really sometimes it’s just common sence.

I rather like both. Although, I think for professional look, the best has to be RedHats…

2005-10-14 11:14 pm

Now people, that’s the wonderful world of GNOME. Not that GNOME is an awfully broken architecture (which is one part of what I critizise) it also has a bad community of mainly slandering and evil people.

To understand GNOME, you need to split GNOME into two parts. First the part that makes the desktop (which we know good enough doesn’t work good enough to be ready for production) and the second part which (as I mentioned a dozen comments earlier) is full of really insulting people.

If you contribute to GNOME then you are a good person (while there are still people disrespecting your contributions where envy and nepothism is on the daily schedule).

I was told that if I dislike GNOME then I should file in bugreports (as proven above) and then I was told to talk with the developers about the stuff that doesn’t work. You can be sure that in all the years I have tried to do this thing but all I earned was the same ignorance that people have shown here.

a) They talk all the critics to death

b) Or they go the dead friendly way, so friendly that it’s not normal anymore. A wrong thing fo friendlyness in the replies which of course ends immediately after that which wasn’t meant to be serious reply at all only demonstrating that they are no jackasses while replying to you.

c) Critics are usually talked to death by giving dozens of replies to you without any offer for solutions or replies without much value.

d) Those who get elected from the foundation members into the board are usually abusing their powers to diffamate other contributors, who permanently violate the foundation charter’s rules.

e) A bunch of GNOME developers have scared away a lot of fine contributors to the GNOME architecture such as Star (long time artist for GNOME), Dr. Frickle (who initially maintained the old GNOME pages), Mr. Baulig (the guy who initially worked his ass off on libgnome/ui and other parts) and many others.

The GNOME crowd can’t live with critics, they can’t professionally deal with critics and not that they can’t deal with critics, they also need to totally kill off those who criticise. That’s why GNOME makes no real progress, that’s why the majority of stuff feels so broken. Because it’s impossible to set through changes inside GNOME, first of all changes of the foundation board, of the release team and other parts of GNOME because it’s always set by the same people. You can’t have anything changed and thus GNOME is full of stuff that is totally horrible – under control of companies like RedHat and Novell.

Not long ago a good friend of the german GNOME community team had the idea (together with his girlfriend) to open “Gnome Girls” the domain was bought the idea was brought up in the GNOME camp and he was pissed off for this because the GNOME people said that the idea sucked, that it was a bda idea and that something like this was not wanted.

A few months later a few girls who work for RedHat have shown up the scene (no one heard of them before) and they wanted to open (yes you guessed) “Gnome Girls” and something must have happened, it’s like a switch you must have turned in the heads of these people. In no time it was a great idea, the best idea that existsted and they got immediately support. Web space has been given, access to CVS has been given and all the other requirements within hours.

Same for the ordinary user, someone who asks for CVS access or for a mailinglist, webspace etc. will be placed on schedule or simply the request is ignored (as usually) but as soon as a new company joins the GNOME scene the resources are given instantly. The people who give all the resources are so what euphoric, they even blow more sugar in the ass of those companies who join that you need to ask yourself how they could hold all that sugar without getting a shock.

Some newcomer to GNOME asked in the channel, what he has to do to get his contributions accepted as part of GNOME. Now from my personal experience over the years I know that the answer must have been – No chance!. I queried him and told him that he probably had no chance that his contributions get accepted by GNOME. I told him a bit of my personal experiences over the years and how rude and egoistic GNOME developers are and that most of the stuff which makes GNOME today are nepothism software written by their own people. They keep ignoring other stuff even if it’s better software. That’s some sort of selfmarketing they do rather than creating a working desktop.

I am also a bit fedup about all the companies that have recently joined the GNOME foundation board. How comes that every company who shows interest in GNOME shows up as member of the GNOME foundation board ? Hell, every little small user who contributes to GNOME needs to pass the membership application, months passes, you get asked dozen of questions what you have done and then you might be lucky to get accepted (happened for me but I resigned from my foundation membership due to heavy abuse). But how comes all these new companies join in as if they were part of GNOME for the past 6 years or longer ?

GNOME, software only for the users ? Or GNOME, software for directmarketing and cash ? How illusionary!

I don’t agree with you, to me the GNOME desktop is more solid and usable than any other Linux DE, I like it, about the developers, I won’t ask, is their problem, as long as they give me a nice, usable and polished GNOME I won’t complaine, My congratulations to the GNOME crew you guys are doing a great job.

2005-10-15 7:20 pm

You can’t disagree without supporting your claim that the issues the author raises aren’t important. There’s no doubt that the GNOME developers are doing great work – but that’s not to say that everything they’re putting out is perfect, or without room for improvement.

2005-10-15 7:35 pm

We can say the same of every other project on the planet including KDE.

How are we supposed to take you seriously when you’re copy and pasting the same messages we’ve seen before?

2005-10-14 11:22 pm

> How are we supposed to take you seriously when you’re

> copy and pasting the same messages we’ve seen before?

How do you take people with 2 dozen fake accounts seriously who have nothing better to do than mass moderate comments down ? I wouldn’t need to copy and paste stuff over and over again if there wasn’t so much abuse.

Please refer to the comments section and skip the last 15 comments or so because some people started to diffamate me and my comments because they had no arguments to counter. As this has been moderated down two times without any reasons + namecalling, I allow myself to repost it again. It’s cheaper than wasting modpoints Looks like truth hurts for some people and that they want to prevent attentive readers from reading above linked comments section People with two dozen fake accounts on OSNews.com are seriously considered to be f–king trolls.

Please refer to the comments section and skip the last 15 comments or so because some people started to diffamate me and my comments because they had no arguments to counter.

As this has been moderated down two times without any reasons + namecalling, I allow myself to repost it again. It’s cheaper than wasting modpoints Looks like truth hurts for some people and that they want to prevent attentive readers from reading above linked comments section

People with two dozen fake accounts on OSNews.com are seriously considered to be f–king trolls.

To the OSN staff, I think you should do something against all those fake accounts that some people keep abusing for violating against the terms and usage of OSN. Wasn’t this one of OSN’s ‘want to do’ things not long ago ? Getting rid of all fake accounts that only exists to mass moderate comments ?

2005-10-14 11:33 pm

Now people, that’s the wonderful world of GNOME. Not that GNOME is an awfully broken architecture (which is one part of what I critizise) it also has a bad community of mainly slandering and evil people.

To understand GNOME, you need to split GNOME into two parts. First the part that makes the desktop (which we know good enough doesn’t work good enough to be ready for production) and the second part which (as I mentioned a dozen comments earlier) is full of really insulting people.

If you contribute to GNOME then you are a good person (while there are still people disrespecting your contributions where envy and nepothism is on the daily schedule).

I was told that if I dislike GNOME then I should file in bugreports (as proven above) and then I was told to talk with the developers about the stuff that doesn’t work. You can be sure that in all the years I have tried to do this thing but all I earned was the same ignorance that people have shown here.

a) They talk all the critics to death

b) Or they go the dead friendly way, so friendly that it’s not normal anymore. A wrong thing fo friendlyness in the replies which of course ends immediately after that which wasn’t meant to be serious reply at all only demonstrating that they are no jackasses while replying to you.

c) Critics are usually talked to death by giving dozens of replies to you without any offer for solutions or replies without much value.

d) Those who get elected from the foundation members into the board are usually abusing their powers to diffamate other contributors, who permanently violate the foundation charter’s rules.

e) A bunch of GNOME developers have scared away a lot of fine contributors to the GNOME architecture such as Star (long time artist for GNOME), Dr. Frickle (who initially maintained the old GNOME pages), Mr. Baulig (the guy who initially worked his ass off on libgnome/ui and other parts) and many others.

The GNOME crowd can’t live with critics, they can’t professionally deal with critics and not that they can’t deal with critics, they also need to totally kill off those who criticise. That’s why GNOME makes no real progress, that’s why the majority of stuff feels so broken. Because it’s impossible to set through changes inside GNOME, first of all changes of the foundation board, of the release team and other parts of GNOME because it’s always set by the same people. You can’t have anything changed and thus GNOME is full of stuff that is totally horrible – under control of companies like RedHat and Novell.

Not long ago a good friend of the german GNOME community team had the idea (together with his girlfriend) to open “Gnome Girls” the domain was bought the idea was brought up in the GNOME camp and he was pissed off for this because the GNOME people said that the idea sucked, that it was a bad idea and that something like this was not wanted.

A few months later a few girls who work for RedHat have shown up the scene (no one heard of them before) and they wanted to open (yes you guessed) “Gnome Girls” and something must have happened, it’s like a switch you must have turned in the heads of these people. In no time it was a great idea, the best idea that existsted and they got immediately support. Web space has been given, access to CVS has been given and all the other requirements within hours.

Same for the ordinary user, someone who asks for CVS access or for a mailinglist, webspace etc. will be placed on schedule or simply the request is ignored (as usually) but as soon as a new company joins the GNOME scene the resources are given instantly. The people who give all the resources are so what euphoric, they even blow more sugar in the ass of those companies who join that you need to ask yourself how they could hold all that sugar without getting a shock.

Some newcomer to GNOME asked in the channel, what he has to do to get his contributions accepted as part of GNOME. Now from my personal experience over the years I know that the answer must have been – No chance!. I queried him and told him that he probably had no chance that his contributions get accepted by GNOME. I told him a bit of my personal experiences over the years and how rude and egoistic GNOME developers are and that most of the stuff which makes GNOME today are nepothism software written by their own people. They keep ignoring other stuff even if it’s better software. That’s some sort of selfmarketing they do rather than creating a working desktop.

I am also a bit fedup about all the companies that have recently joined the GNOME foundation board. How comes that every company who shows interest in GNOME shows up as member of the GNOME foundation board ? Hell, every little small user who contributes to GNOME needs to pass the membership application, months passes, you get asked dozen of questions what you have done and then you might be lucky to get accepted (happened for me but I resigned from my foundation membership due to heavy abuse). But how comes all these new companies join in as if they were part of GNOME for the past 6 years or longer ?

GNOME, software only for the users ? Or GNOME, software for directmarketing and cash ? How illusionary!

How do you take people with two dozen fake accounts seriously who have nothing better to do than mass moderate comments down ? I wouldn’t need to copy and paste stuff over and over again if there wasn’t so much abuse.

Please refer to the comments section and skip the last 15 comments or so because some people started to diffamate me and my comments because they had no arguments to counter.

As this has been moderated down two times without any reasons + namecalling, I allow myself to repost it again. It’s cheaper than wasting modpoints Looks like truth hurts for some people and that they want to prevent attentive readers from reading above linked comments section

People with two dozen fake accounts on OSNews.com are seriously considered to be fsking trolls.

To the OSN staff, I think you should do something against all those fake accounts that some people keep abusing for violating against the terms and usage of OSN. Wasn’t this one of OSN’s ‘want to do’ things not long ago ? Getting rid of all fake accounts that only exists to mass moderate comments ?

Please refer to the comments section and skip the last 15 comments or so because some people started to diffamate me and my comments because they had no arguments to counter.

As this has been moderated down two times without any reasons + namecalling, I allow myself to repost it again. It’s cheaper than wasting modpoints Looks like truth hurts for some people and that they want to prevent attentive readers from reading above linked comments section

People with two dozen fake accounts on OSNews.com are seriously considered to be fsking trolls.

To the OSN staff, I think you should do something against all those fake accounts that some people keep abusing for violating against the terms and usage of OSN. Wasn’t this one of OSN’s ‘want to do’ things not long ago ? Getting rid of all fake accounts that only exists to mass moderate comments ?

*lol*

2005-10-14 11:41 pm

> How are we supposed to take you seriously when you’re

> copy and pasting the same messages we’ve seen before?

How do you take people with two dozen fake accounts seriously who have nothing better to do than mass moderate comments down ? I wouldn’t need to copy and paste stuff over and over again if there wasn’t so much abuse.

*lol*

2005-10-14 11:49 pm

Ok the situation here seem to have cleared up a bit and those who had dozen of fake accounts finally trashed all their modpoints. I feel sorry for having to use the axe method only to write my very own opinion about GNOME but well. It’s up to OSNews.com to solve the issues with abuse and mass moderation done by those with these fake accounts.

But now some further words about GNOME and why I think it’s so damn broken and why I believe that contributions alone don’t solve the issues.

The problem is not the contributions. The problem is getting those contributions accepted by the maintainers.

Over the years I realized that the request of contributions is just a poor excuse to avoid conversations with the developers or users who want something to get changed.

Some stuff in gnome-vfs for example was so utterly broken that it wasn’t touched for a really long time. There wasn’t even a maintainer for it (only a guy who kept putting some stuff in there whenever it was needed). Now some other people seem to have taken over the maintainance of it and the process continues.

But within the GNOME development team I found out (due to own experience) that it’s quite difficult if not highly impossible to get some ideas through or to convince a developer that a different approach would have been wiser or better. Not to say save a lot of time. But people kept using the broken components for years.

Even now not everything inside GNOME is sane or reliable and a lot of stuff seem to be reinvented over and over again. See DBUS for example or basic things like “specifications” as found on freedesktop.org. GNOME makes freedesktop.org sound like it’s a place for developers from GNOME and KDE to met and declare specifications but this is not always true since KDE had solved most of the necessary things that GNOME still urgently needs years before and their specifications and solutions are often by far better thought through and much more mature – and over the years proven that it also works practically and not just as concept.

For example you can compile KDE with a static prefix in say /opt/kde3 and later on you can move this entire directory to /usr/local/kde3 without the need to recompile anything. On GNOME we sill have the issue that every path is hardcoded inside the binaries so you can’t move the entire location if necessary. One of the bad concepts of GNOME.

Another bad thing about GNOME is that the developers do have nice ideas at time but they lack the power or durability to make the changes or visions they have complete. GStreamer for example is indeed a nice technology and it somehow made it’s path inside GNOME but still it doesn’t feel like it’s truly part of GNOME since some apps use it, others avoid using it and stick to xine. Now if these apps stick to xine then chances that GStreamer gets fixed and a whole part of GNOME is low.

Another thing is that plenty of the developers seem to have rotating focus on stuff. Today they work on this one, then tomorrow they focus on hacking on Mozilla or hack on ‘dead ideas’ they have that no one really takes serious so all the resources of working and fixing GNOME get’s lost with playground stuff.

We all know that GNOME was meant to be a corporate desktop. But then a corporate desktop needs different resources and a different approach. Serious project leading is required, strict guidelines are required, and people with brains to enable them.

It can not be (now that the HIG as guideline exists for some years) that applications developer still ignore it. I don’t care for third party stuff. But I do care for the important and key elements of GNOME software that should be a good example and follow these guidelines.

GIMP, DIA, Evolution, Abiword, Gnumeric only to name a few are in no way HIG conform. Some are, but others not. I filled in a bug for Gnumeric not long ago pointing the developer to the HIG v2.0 where it says that the Toolbar should obey the rules of Toolbar & Menus capplet (which is a core part of GNOME) unfortunately the bug was closed as not a bug and no further comments have been given to it.

Also printing is a necessary importand thing in GNOME imo and it can’t be that I load up GThumb to print a *.gif file and it ends up in printing a totally black picture on a white sheet of paper, wasting nearly 1/3 of my black ink cartridge.

It’s also inacceptable for a corporate desktop to have a document reader and viewer like Evince that prints a whole document correctly with correct fonts but as soon as I start printing one page out of it messes the fonts totally up (looks like monotype fonts when printed).

It’s the release team to take care of what they include inside GNOME, if the stuff is still immature or not working properly then it should by all means be avoided for inclusion since it doesn’t help anyone. GNOME is often claimed to be the desktop to get work done. But I often find myself to do more work in fixing stuff around GNOME rather than getting work done. Printing job applications usually ends the way that I switch into console and print over ghostscript using cups rather than trusting gnome-print or evince (which fault this is I don’t know but a confirmed bugreport exists).

As a corporate desktop I urgently require reliable tools and I require these tools today and not – one day. Look DIA, Nautilus, Evolution and many other tools exists for years now and DIA is nowhere to be usable and I often tried giving them a helping hand which I got ugly repsonses from the maintainers.

This does help the corporate idea how ? In no ways does this help anything. I do find the “Tango Project” and “Better Desktop” to be a nice thing but I somehow got the feeling that it’s just a reaction towards the plasma project that KDE offers.

Unfortunately in my opinion the KDE people do make a better figure with what they announce because most of the stuff they do works. Sure, not perfectly and sometimes you have quirks and other issues inside KDE as well but the tools exists to get work done. You don’t need to think about does it print correctly. It simply does. You don’t need to worry about Kivio or Umbrella not working correctly they simply do make a better shape than DIA for example.

KDE may look overwhelming complex and overloaded in the eyes of inexperienced people but in other peoples minds it looks just right and offers all the stuff one really needs without worrying.

I don’t say that these things won’t show up for GNOME one day but I can tell you from personal experiences that developing for GNOME is a nightmare.

As initially said you can easily move a final compiled KDE binary system from one dir to another and have the stuff work perfectly and perfectly find the datafiles. GNOME doesn’t offer that.

Unfortunately this is done on purpose. It’s not about what I have to say, it’s about who I am ! I’ve used to be and still am somehow a long years contributor to GNOME and all I wanted to do here was to post a few comments about my very own opinion – It’s sad that the OSN staff isn’t able to deal with the huge abuse of those who have multiple fake accounts on this site. I do feel sorry, but I also dislike being treatened like an ass.

Just a side note, the one who keeps posting those comments, is he the same guy who whined consistantly about the fact that the ok/cancel button order was reversed, then turned around and declared that he was going to fork a version of GNOME that ‘corrected’ the ‘terrible mistakes’ as he put it?

Ah, thats it, “Galaxy” is what he used to call himself – damn memory seems to remember everything but the important things

Hmm, someone pool some money together for the poor lad and get him laid; maybe then he’ll realise that his holy war against the so-called ‘establishment’ is nothing more than a wasted effort by a lonely boy to take his mind off the fact that he is a complete loser.

KDE has objects for Toolbars. That is, if you put that Toolbar object in your window then you have all the aditional features for it as well such as editing Toolbars, such as the same height, same objects and same icons inside. GNOME unfortunately doesn’t offer that, every application looks differently, look at VMWare for example which is using GTK+ now. Look at the Menu it has a draghandle, now look in what GNOME or GTK+ apps exists that have a draghandle there ? It uses GTK+ – yes but it feels differently.

The HIG for GNOME sounds like a joke and if you point people with the finger on the HIG and say ‘hey would you please adopt these things’ then you get a response telling you that the HIG is incomplete or lacks thought in these areas and so they can not apply the HIG to their app – which imo is a bad excuse. The HIG is meant so people follow guides, but not meant that people do change the HIG so it fits the applications (developers) bad excuses.

The computer is a toy that you should use but not have the computer use you (to explain the HIG situation a bit differently).

Now if you count all the stuff together that I mentioned (RB, GStreamer, Evolution, Nautilus, broken gnome-vfs, Toolbar issues, and many more (and I bet you found tons of annyances on your own and again others do so too)) then all these annoyances summed up results in the conclusion that GNOME is not well thought through and way behind it’s competition.

Good marketing surely helps and a site such as OSNews.com who regularey promote GNOME and ignore KDE (on purpose) may help GNOME too (and money stuffed in the throaths of those news sites help too) but in reality this is all masquerading and not really helpful. If people want to live behind lies and accept these to be ok then be it like this but it’s not my way of thinking.

Sure this is all about open source and everyone can do whatever he want’s but we talk about a corporate desktop here.

For example a certificate manager, IDE, Webdevelopment, Games, Education stuff (with useful things inside like maths, vocabulary and so on), UML, Fax Software, Printing Software, Reader, Internet Download Manager, Browser, Newsreader, Mail client, Instant Messenger, Remote Desktop connection, amarok, k3b, koffice (kivio, krita, kword, kspread, kpresenter and so on), task juggler and many many more apps. The majority of the things I mentioned above is already part of KDE. You most likely don’t need these things but another one will and if you don’t need these things today then you might do one day and then you will be thankful for these tools to exists and be there.

And I don’t doubt that if GNOME would have these things then they would all bundle it as ‘The GNOME’ if they can. This probably also explains the huge success of Ubuntu which ships all of that. People don’t necessarily need them today but they probably will one day.

But with KDE I get these things and most of these tools are far more advanced and far better implemented using a solid ground architecture. The toolbars are all similar using the same technology, the printing dialogs are all the same, they all smoothly build up on the same good solid architecture that KDE offers.

I don’t say that the majority of applications found for GNOME are bad, no way. But I believe due to the architecture that GNOME offers these applications are not mature enough or not thought through well enough. These applications could have been better and more coherent if the gound architecture of GNOME wouldn’t allow half a dozen of Toolbar types for example (and this from libraries that hopefully will be considered non existing soon).

The problem of GNOME’s bad framework causes that all the GNOME applications that exists do look differently, behave differently, react differently on global preferences changes. Also stuff like proper clipboard support for GNOME is lacking (maybe these things are included in a distribution) but then huge work went inside the distro to achieve this goal. But I am refering here to the GNOME that exists on CVS or which get released through tarballs.

GNOME would suck less if the ground architecture would simply work. That basic things like windows, toolbars, menus would be done in ONE WAY rather than 20 different ways, that tools like Glade should be re-invented properly and not this poor thing that people keep designing their dialogs with and where properties inside the *.glade files are set inproperly and wrong. GNOME would also suck less if it had a global plugins system such as Kioslave or KParts. Bonobo is so what complex that no real documents exists. So instead writing plugins or snapins so other apps inside GNOME can use it. People keep writing new libraries and make all the apps depend on these libraries because its the easier solution for them to solve this task. A plugins pool where apps could grab a working object and register it with their programs would have been a better choice imo.

What annoys the hell out of me are the basic tasks that GNOME can not really acomplish, it fails with simple things. Things that you usually shouldn’t think about because you expect the stuff to simply work and to get your work done. That’s the area where GNOME lacks and even small things such as a clipboard manager is announced on OSNews.com like its the biggest invention in century while other competition desktops such as KDE offer these things for years as it’s natural thing to have. People and even developers in the GNOME camp keep pridefully arguing how much KDE’s implementations do suck. But hey, they at least have these things.

GNOME is a never ending pit, where you keep working on fixing even trivial things and this is a never ending story, you keep ranting and flaming about these things for years and now years have passed and those things still make slow progress. And still the same people have nerves declaring GNOME as the standard default corporate desktop. While it lacks in so many areas.

Now that even trivial tasks can be a nightmare inside GNOME how does it look if you deal with huge complex stuff. Ever thought about that.

In case someone asks me when I last used GNOME then be sure that I do use the latest GNOME there is and that I know it good enough to be serious of what I write.

Your post makes sense, and matches my experience with the Gnome desktop environment. Sadly, you’re posting in a pro Gnome news article, on a pro Gnome website, with many pro Gnome users, who are viciously against anything that so much as dares to criticise the Gnome Desktop. Again, I’d ask the osnews.com staff to get off their asses and actually monitor who is repetitively modding down posts that criticise the Gnome desktop environment and maybe close their accounts as they are abusing the modding system? I fail to see anything wrong with your post, and it should never have been modded down, it has broken none of the osnews.com rules that I can see. The problem with a modding system like this, is that when you are a minority poster, posting on an article/thread filled with pro users, you might have absolutely valid points, but you will almost certainly get modded down in a unfair and hostile way.

You get a +1 from me for having the guts to state your views, and stand by them, and put up with some very poor losers that visit the osnews.com website and actively mod down posts that they disagree with. I’d suggest some of the pro Gnome users actually read the osnews.com guidelines for modding. And then learn to curb their trigger happy fingers and cease modding down posts inappropriately – merely disagree with a post is no means to mod it down.

Dave

2005-10-14 11:51 pm

Now people, that’s the wonderful world of GNOME. Not that GNOME is an awfully broken architecture (which is one part of what I critizise) it also has a bad community of mainly slandering and evil people.

To understand GNOME, you need to split GNOME into two parts. First the part that makes the desktop (which we know good enough doesn’t work good enough to be ready for production) and the second part which (as I mentioned a dozen comments earlier) is full of really insulting people.

If you contribute to GNOME then you are a good person (while there are still people disrespecting your contributions where envy and nepothism is on the daily schedule).

I was told that if I dislike GNOME then I should file in bugreports (as proven above) and then I was told to talk with the developers about the stuff that doesn’t work. You can be sure that in all the years I have tried to do this thing but all I earned was the same ignorance that people have shown here.

a) They talk all the critics to death

b) Or they go the dead friendly way, so friendly that it’s not normal anymore. A wrong thing fo friendlyness in the replies which of course ends immediately after that which wasn’t meant to be serious reply at all only demonstrating that they are no jackasses while replying to you.

c) Critics are usually talked to death by giving dozens of replies to you without any offer for solutions or replies without much value.

d) Those who get elected from the foundation members into the board are usually abusing their powers to diffamate other contributors, who permanently violate the foundation charter’s rules.

e) A bunch of GNOME developers have scared away a lot of fine contributors to the GNOME architecture such as Star (long time artist for GNOME), Dr. Frickle (who initially maintained the old GNOME pages), Mr. Baulig (the guy who initially worked his ass off on libgnome/ui and other parts) and many others.

The GNOME crowd can’t live with critics, they can’t professionally deal with critics and not that they can’t deal with critics, they also need to totally kill off those who criticise. That’s why GNOME makes no real progress, that’s why the majority of stuff feels so broken. Because it’s impossible to set through changes inside GNOME, first of all changes of the foundation board, of the release team and other parts of GNOME because it’s always set by the same people. You can’t have anything changed and thus GNOME is full of stuff that is totally horrible – under control of companies like RedHat and Novell.

Not long ago a good friend of the german GNOME community team had the idea (together with his girlfriend) to open “Gnome Girls” the domain was bought the idea was brought up in the GNOME camp and he was pissed off for this because the GNOME people said that the idea sucked, that it was a bad idea and that something like this was not wanted.

A few months later a few girls who work for RedHat have shown up the scene (no one heard of them before) and they wanted to open (yes you guessed) “Gnome Girls” and something must have happened, it’s like a switch you must have turned in the heads of these people. In no time it was a great idea, the best idea that existsted and they got immediately support. Web space has been given, access to CVS has been given and all the other requirements within hours.

Same for the ordinary user, someone who asks for CVS access or for a mailinglist, webspace etc. will be placed on schedule or simply the request is ignored (as usually) but as soon as a new company joins the GNOME scene the resources are given instantly. The people who give all the resources are so what euphoric, they even blow more sugar in the ass of those companies who join that you need to ask yourself how they could hold all that sugar without getting a shock.

Some newcomer to GNOME asked in the channel, what he has to do to get his contributions accepted as part of GNOME. Now from my personal experience over the years I know that the answer must have been – No chance!. I queried him and told him that he probably had no chance that his contributions get accepted by GNOME. I told him a bit of my personal experiences over the years and how rude and egoistic GNOME developers are and that most of the stuff which makes GNOME today are nepothism software written by their own people. They keep ignoring other stuff even if it’s better software. That’s some sort of selfmarketing they do rather than creating a working desktop.

I am also a bit fedup about all the companies that have recently joined the GNOME foundation board. How comes that every company who shows interest in GNOME shows up as member of the GNOME foundation board ? Hell, every little small user who contributes to GNOME needs to pass the membership application, months passes, you get asked dozen of questions what you have done and then you might be lucky to get accepted (happened for me but I resigned from my foundation membership due to heavy abuse). But how comes all these new companies join in as if they were part of GNOME for the past 6 years or longer ?

GNOME, software only for the users ? Or GNOME, software for directmarketing and cash ? How illusionary !

2005-10-14 11:52 pm

KDE has objects for Toolbars. That is, if you put that Toolbar object in your window then you have all the aditional features for it as well such as editing Toolbars, such as the same height, same objects and same icons inside. GNOME unfortunately doesn’t offer that, every application looks differently, look at VMWare for example which is using GTK+ now. Look at the Menu it has a draghandle, now look in what GNOME or GTK+ apps exists that have a draghandle there ? It uses GTK+ – yes but it feels differently.

The HIG for GNOME sounds like a joke and if you point people with the finger on the HIG and say ‘hey would you please adopt these things’ then you get a response telling you that the HIG is incomplete or lacks thought in these areas and so they can not apply the HIG to their app – which imo is a bad excuse. The HIG is meant so people follow guides, but not meant that people do change the HIG so it fits the applications (developers) bad excuses.

The computer is a toy that you should use but not have the computer use you (to explain the HIG situation a bit differently).

Now if you count all the stuff together that I mentioned (RB, GStreamer, Evolution, Nautilus, broken gnome-vfs, Toolbar issues, and many more (and I bet you found tons of annyances on your own and again others do so too)) then all these annoyances summed up results in the conclusion that GNOME is not well thought through and way behind it’s competition.

Good marketing surely helps and a site such as OSNews.com who regularey promote GNOME and ignore KDE (on purpose) may help GNOME too (and money stuffed in the throaths of those news sites help too) but in reality this is all masquerading and not really helpful. If people want to live behind lies and accept these to be ok then be it like this but it’s not my way of thinking.

Sure this is all about open source and everyone can do whatever he want’s but we talk about a corporate desktop here.

For example a certificate manager, IDE, Webdevelopment, Games, Education stuff (with useful things inside like maths, vocabulary and so on), UML, Fax Software, Printing Software, Reader, Internet Download Manager, Browser, Newsreader, Mail client, Instant Messenger, Remote Desktop connection, amarok, k3b, koffice (kivio, krita, kword, kspread, kpresenter and so on), task juggler and many many more apps. The majority of the things I mentioned above is already part of KDE. You most likely don’t need these things but another one will and if you don’t need these things today then you might do one day and then you will be thankful for these tools to exists and be there.

And I don’t doubt that if GNOME would have these things then they would all bundle it as ‘The GNOME’ if they can. This probably also explains the huge success of Ubuntu which ships all of that. People don’t necessarily need them today but they probably will one day.

But with KDE I get these things and most of these tools are far more advanced and far better implemented using a solid ground architecture. The toolbars are all similar using the same technology, the printing dialogs are all the same, they all smoothly build up on the same good solid architecture that KDE offers.

I don’t say that the majority of applications found for GNOME are bad, no way. But I believe due to the architecture that GNOME offers these applications are not mature enough or not thought through well enough. These applications could have been better and more coherent if the gound architecture of GNOME wouldn’t allow half a dozen of Toolbar types for example (and this from libraries that hopefully will be considered non existing soon).

The problem of GNOME’s bad framework causes that all the GNOME applications that exists do look differently, behave differently, react differently on global preferences changes. Also stuff like proper clipboard support for GNOME is lacking (maybe these things are included in a distribution) but then huge work went inside the distro to achieve this goal. But I am refering here to the GNOME that exists on CVS or which get released through tarballs.

GNOME would suck less if the ground architecture would simply work. That basic things like windows, toolbars, menus would be done in ONE WAY rather than 20 different ways, that tools like Glade should be re-invented properly and not this poor thing that people keep designing their dialogs with and where properties inside the *.glade files are set inproperly and wrong. GNOME would also suck less if it had a global plugins system such as Kioslave or KParts. Bonobo is so what complex that no real documents exists. So instead writing plugins or snapins so other apps inside GNOME can use it. People keep writing new libraries and make all the apps depend on these libraries because its the easier solution for them to solve this task. A plugins pool where apps could grab a working object and register it with their programs would have been a better choice imo.

What annoys the hell out of me are the basic tasks that GNOME can not really acomplish, it fails with simple things. Things that you usually shouldn’t think about because you expect the stuff to simply work and to get your work done. That’s the area where GNOME lacks and even small things such as a clipboard manager is announced on OSNews.com like its the biggest invention in century while other competition desktops such as KDE offer these things for years as it’s natural thing to have. People and even developers in the GNOME camp keep pridefully arguing how much KDE’s implementations do suck. But hey, they at least have these things.

GNOME is a never ending pit, where you keep working on fixing even trivial things and this is a never ending story, you keep ranting and flaming about these things for years and now years have passed and those things still make slow progress. And still the same people have nerves declaring GNOME as the standard default corporate desktop. While it lacks in so many areas.

Now that even trivial tasks can be a nightmare inside GNOME how does it look if you deal with huge complex stuff. Ever thought about that.

In case someone asks me when I last used GNOME then be sure that I do use the latest GNOME there is and that I know it good enough to be serious of what I write.

2005-10-14 11:53 pm

Ok the situation here seem to have cleared up a bit and those who had dozen of fake accounts finally trashed all their modpoints. I feel sorry for having to use the axe method only to write my very own opinion about GNOME but well. It’s up to OSNews.com to solve the issues with abuse and mass moderation done by those with these fake accounts.

But now some further words about GNOME and why I think it’s so damn broken and why I believe that contributions alone don’t solve the issues.

The problem is not the contributions. The problem is getting those contributions accepted by the maintainers.

Over the years I realized that the request of contributions is just a poor excuse to avoid conversations with the developers or users who want something to get changed.

Some stuff in gnome-vfs for example was so utterly broken that it wasn’t touched for a really long time. There wasn’t even a maintainer for it (only a guy who kept putting some stuff in there whenever it was needed). Now some other people seem to have taken over the maintainance of it and the process continues.

But within the GNOME development team I found out (due to own experience) that it’s quite difficult if not highly impossible to get some ideas through or to convince a developer that a different approach would have been wiser or better. Not to say save a lot of time. But people kept using the broken components for years.

Even now not everything inside GNOME is sane or reliable and a lot of stuff seem to be reinvented over and over again. See DBUS for example or basic things like “specifications” as found on freedesktop.org. GNOME makes freedesktop.org sound like it’s a place for developers from GNOME and KDE to met and declare specifications but this is not always true since KDE had solved most of the necessary things that GNOME still urgently needs years before and their specifications and solutions are often by far better thought through and much more mature – and over the years proven that it also works practically and not just as concept.

For example you can compile KDE with a static prefix in say /opt/kde3 and later on you can move this entire directory to /usr/local/kde3 without the need to recompile anything. On GNOME we sill have the issue that every path is hardcoded inside the binaries so you can’t move the entire location if necessary. One of the bad concepts of GNOME.

Another bad thing about GNOME is that the developers do have nice ideas at time but they lack the power or durability to make the changes or visions they have complete. GStreamer for example is indeed a nice technology and it somehow made it’s path inside GNOME but still it doesn’t feel like it’s truly part of GNOME since some apps use it, others avoid using it and stick to xine. Now if these apps stick to xine then chances that GStreamer gets fixed and a whole part of GNOME is low.

Another thing is that plenty of the developers seem to have rotating focus on stuff. Today they work on this one, then tomorrow they focus on hacking on Mozilla or hack on ‘dead ideas’ they have that no one really takes serious so all the resources of working and fixing GNOME get’s lost with playground stuff.

We all know that GNOME was meant to be a corporate desktop. But then a corporate desktop needs different resources and a different approach. Serious project leading is required, strict guidelines are required, and people with brains to enable them.

It can not be (now that the HIG as guideline exists for some years) that applications developer still ignore it. I don’t care for third party stuff. But I do care for the important and key elements of GNOME software that should be a good example and follow these guidelines.

GIMP, DIA, Evolution, Abiword, Gnumeric only to name a few are in no way HIG conform. Some are, but others not. I filled in a bug for Gnumeric not long ago pointing the developer to the HIG v2.0 where it says that the Toolbar should obey the rules of Toolbar & Menus capplet (which is a core part of GNOME) unfortunately the bug was closed as not a bug and no further comments have been given to it.

Also printing is a necessary importand thing in GNOME imo and it can’t be that I load up GThumb to print a *.gif file and it ends up in printing a totally black picture on a white sheet of paper, wasting nearly 1/3 of my black ink cartridge.

It’s also inacceptable for a corporate desktop to have a document reader and viewer like Evince that prints a whole document correctly with correct fonts but as soon as I start printing one page out of it messes the fonts totally up (looks like monotype fonts when printed).

It’s the release team to take care of what they include inside GNOME, if the stuff is still immature or not working properly then it should by all means be avoided for inclusion since it doesn’t help anyone. GNOME is often claimed to be the desktop to get work done. But I often find myself to do more work in fixing stuff around GNOME rather than getting work done. Printing job applications usually ends the way that I switch into console and print over ghostscript using cups rather than trusting gnome-print or evince (which fault this is I don’t know but a confirmed bugreport exists).

As a corporate desktop I urgently require reliable tools and I require these tools today and not – one day. Look DIA, Nautilus, Evolution and many other tools exists for years now and DIA is nowhere to be usable and I often tried giving them a helping hand which I got ugly repsonses from the maintainers.

This does help the corporate idea how ? In no ways does this help anything. I do find the “Tango Project” and “Better Desktop” to be a nice thing but I somehow got the feeling that it’s just a reaction towards the plasma project that KDE offers.

Unfortunately in my opinion the KDE people do make a better figure with what they announce because most of the stuff they do works. Sure, not perfectly and sometimes you have quirks and other issues inside KDE as well but the tools exists to get work done. You don’t need to think about does it print correctly. It simply does. You don’t need to worry about Kivio or Umbrella not working correctly they simply do make a better shape than DIA for example.

KDE may look overwhelming complex and overloaded in the eyes of inexperienced people but in other peoples minds it looks just right and offers all the stuff one really needs without worrying.

I don’t say that these things won’t show up for GNOME one day but I can tell you from personal experiences that developing for GNOME is a nightmare.

As initially said you can easily move a final compiled KDE binary system from one dir to another and have the stuff work perfectly and perfectly find the datafiles. GNOME doesn’t offer that.

2005-10-14 11:58 pm

Now people, that’s the wonderful world of GNOME. Not that GNOME is an awfully broken architecture (which is one part of what I critizise) it also has a bad community of mainly slandering and evil people.

To understand GNOME, you need to split GNOME into two parts. First the part that makes the desktop (which we know good enough doesn’t work good enough to be ready for production) and the second part which (as I mentioned a dozen comments earlier) is full of really insulting people.

If you contribute to GNOME then you are a good person (while there are still people disrespecting your contributions where envy and nepothism is on the daily schedule).

I was told that if I dislike GNOME then I should file in bugreports (as proven above) and then I was told to talk with the developers about the stuff that doesn’t work. You can be sure that in all the years I have tried to do this thing but all I earned was the same ignorance that people have shown here.

a) They talk all the critics to death

b) Or they go the dead friendly way, so friendly that it’s not normal anymore. A wrong thing fo friendlyness in the replies which of course ends immediately after that which wasn’t meant to be serious reply at all only demonstrating that they are no jackasses while replying to you.

c) Critics are usually talked to death by giving dozens of replies to you without any offer for solutions or replies without much value.

d) Those who get elected from the foundation members into the board are usually abusing their powers to diffamate other contributors, who permanently violate the foundation charter’s rules.

e) A bunch of GNOME developers have scared away a lot of fine contributors to the GNOME architecture such as Star (long time artist for GNOME), Dr. Frickle (who initially maintained the old GNOME pages), Mr. Baulig (the guy who initially worked his ass off on libgnome/ui and other parts) and many others.

The GNOME crowd can’t live with critics, they can’t professionally deal with critics and not that they can’t deal with critics, they also need to totally kill off those who criticise. That’s why GNOME makes no real progress, that’s why the majority of stuff feels so broken. Because it’s impossible to set through changes inside GNOME, first of all changes of the foundation board, of the release team and other parts of GNOME because it’s always set by the same people. You can’t have anything changed and thus GNOME is full of stuff that is totally horrible – under control of companies like RedHat and Novell.

Not long ago a good friend of the german GNOME community team had the idea (together with his girlfriend) to open “Gnome Girls” the domain was bought the idea was brought up in the GNOME camp and he was pissed off for this because the GNOME people said that the idea sucked, that it was a bad idea and that something like this was not wanted.

A few months later a few girls who work for RedHat have shown up the scene (no one heard of them before) and they wanted to open (yes you guessed) “Gnome Girls” and something must have happened, it’s like a switch you must have turned in the heads of these people. In no time it was a great idea, the best idea that existsted and they got immediately support. Web space has been given, access to CVS has been given and all the other requirements within hours.

Same for the ordinary user, someone who asks for CVS access or for a mailinglist, webspace etc. will be placed on schedule or simply the request is ignored (as usually) but as soon as a new company joins the GNOME scene the resources are given instantly. The people who give all the resources are so what euphoric, they even blow more sugar in the ass of those companies who join that you need to ask yourself how they could hold all that sugar without getting a shock.

Some newcomer to GNOME asked in the channel, what he has to do to get his contributions accepted as part of GNOME. Now from my personal experience over the years I know that the answer must have been – No chance!. I queried him and told him that he probably had no chance that his contributions get accepted by GNOME. I told him a bit of my personal experiences over the years and how rude and egoistic GNOME developers are and that most of the stuff which makes GNOME today are nepothism software written by their own people. They keep ignoring other stuff even if it’s better software. That’s some sort of selfmarketing they do rather than creating a working desktop.

I am also a bit fedup about all the companies that have recently joined the GNOME foundation board. How comes that every company who shows interest in GNOME shows up as member of the GNOME foundation board ? Hell, every little small user who contributes to GNOME needs to pass the membership application, months passes, you get asked dozen of questions what you have done and then you might be lucky to get accepted (happened for me but I resigned from my foundation membership due to heavy abuse). But how comes all these new companies join in as if they were part of GNOME for the past 6 years or longer ?

GNOME, software only for the users ? Or GNOME, software for directmarketing and cash ? How illusionary !

Last repost! Ok, time to go to bed.

2005-10-15 12:00 am

This guy should be interned. Seriously, he’s got some serious problems.

According to guidelines this post ought to modded down to -5 but it gets modded up to +3.

A clear proof of abuse of the modding points.

2005-10-15 12:00 am

Wow, I would’ve never thought this would make OSnews. It was intended mainly to get some discussion and other user’s comments and refine my ideas, to prepare for sending them to the appropriate channels. This was never meant for circulation, or i would have spent some more time working on it. It’s not sorted by importance, some stuff is not really important; like I stated in the beginning of the post, I just took everything I noticed during a couple of weeks of intensive Gnome usage.

Yes, I have the idea of drag&drop saving from rox (my second favorite desktop environment). I think it would work really well with Nautilus’ spatial mode.

Yes, I mean hiding the structure. No changes to anything, just a file that contains everything to be hidden, so users who want complete unix structure in nautilus can just delete that file and see everything. Part of this is just to remove the complaint from some people that “linux sucks, cause the file structure is so complicated”. And some users like exploring, and then get confused.

Of course, autocomplete is nice, but a dialog shouldn’t autocomplete to a file when that will only produce an error. Autocompleting and then opening the file would be even better

There are workarounds or tricks for some of the problems, but that does not mean a problem doesn’t exist. There are people – sometimes even experienced ones – who don’t know every way to do things, and Gnome is for them too.

A lot of your stuff is better stated simply as refinements rather than problems. I would never consider having to use a save dialog as a problem.. I’d be happier to see D&D work between KDE and GTK before I’d care about D&D saving!

But you made some really good suggestions, and people who will care to fix it will likely hear about them now. But you should probably file these with Gnome’s system.

2005-10-15 12:01 am

One more thing I forgot to mention, I think Gnome should put minimize, maximize, close window to the left like OSX. I mean it just makes since like having the gnome menu bar at the top, the navigation bar it to the left so why should I move my mouse to the right in a bit of useless space of the window?

Talk about usability issues, KDE and Windows have bigger ones with having the menu on bottom left, thats just wrong and bad usability. Nobody reads bottom,top to right do they!

You can change button order with a number of third party tweaking tools. I believe that GNOME uses the windows style order out of pure familiarity concerns at this point.

I don’t like the windows order or the os-x order very much. I personally use minimize,maximize:close which works rather well I think.

2005-10-15 1:18 am

I don’t even use a maximize anymore. With such a high resolution and lots of real estate, why bother? I use minimize:close, and it works great. An added bonus is to use sloppy focus, and it actually feels like you’re working with “windows.”

I’d prefer the “maximize” button from Mac OS X. Though I’ve never used it, from what I’ve heard, it resizes the window to a value recommended by the application.

I often use the maximize button as a lazy way to make the window bigger, to see more stuff (I happen to have notebooks with 1024×768 resolution only). However, maximizing often makes no sense for e.g. terminal windows (no need for more than 80 columns ; can be solved by doing maximize-vertical-only), picture /document viewers (no need for white/black bars at the side of the document) or remote connection apps such as VNC, Terminal Services – (no need for black bars around the remote desktop).

It would probably require co-operation from apps, therefore it probably won’t appear soon in any window manager.

2005-10-15 4:52 am

“One more thing I forgot to mention, I think Gnome should put minimize, maximize, close window to the left like OSX.”

That is something you can do in KDE without third party tools. You can also easily move the Menu to the top left or wherever you want. It’s that whole choice thing Gnome seems to dislike.

I can see why one would argue that the developers should make the right choice from the start instead of letting users do it later, but I really value the ability to make a different choice if I disagree with the devs. With KDE, windows converts can keep a bottom left start button and top right titlebar buttons, or someone like you could move the titlebar buttons to the left and put all or part of the kicker/taskbar on the top.

Actually it’s better for usability. It makes the start menu accessible from a corner while leaving one window control button accessible from the top right corner (which KDE fails to do often anyway). Now, I think having the close button on the corner is bad usability because I sincerely doubt it’s the most common task (and if it is the whole paradigm is messed up).

Having a menu bar at the top makes the window control inaccessible from a corner.

Mac gets away with it because they have the menu bar at the top, and that’s INCREDIBLY USEFUL.

I don’t especially like GNOME. Whenever I try it it just feels “wrong”; I use a number of different WMs, KDE, Windows and sometimes OSX and I just can’t get used to GNOME (although it’s better than CDE when I have to use a SUN)

I also think that the GNOME project has a number of problems, their style of decision-making, the NIH syndrome etc.

I even think that troll’s posts make some (emphasize on some) valid points.

But, geez, that guy is an annoying little troll so I hereby officially found “Gnome Haters for Banning Anonymous (IP: 84.129.228.—)”

“He has a long history of this same sort of behavior on several message boards going back at least three years.”

Greetings,

First off all, please do me a favor and stop publicly calling me names and if you do so, then please write my real name correctly.

I am quite upset about this place and find it embarrassing how people are treated. To set something correct. I wasn’t banned from this place and still I am not as you can see here. For what reason actually ?

I had many discussions with Eugenia in the past and we came to the conclusion that most of the stuff that I keep writing is indeed right but for my personal interest I should stay out of heated conversations because it’s impossible to convince everyone. So far she was right. But then this is a free place after all with the intend of people replying.

Well now coming to the point of what I write. I don’t think that I have to justify myself here, nor do I need to explain why I write things and why not.

All I wanted to do in this thread was to point people to one of the older GNOME related articles comments section which briefly addresses some of the usability issues found inside GNOME, which I believe are true.

But after I sent the comment (which was intended to be only one comment) it was moderated down before I was able to reload it. Of course I overreacted a bit by having repost a few longer articles a couple of times – because I was pissed off. Even comments written after that got nuked down for no real reason. Even before someone was able to read them.

But I do see the tendency of this site to primarily support GNOME and I also see a lot of really abusive people here. Not to mention that some people here got moderated up regardless if they were violating against the terms of usage – by calling people at names.

Having a free opinion seems to be not existing on this site and I feel quite upset about this. Free opinion only exists as long as it supports the opinion of the Staff people here. I start to consider Slashdot to be more open minded in this regard.

About my history, I don’t think I have to justify myself about my history here. You can go back and read the stuff that I have written and I don’t need to feel ashamed about it since most of the stuff written by me only reflect my very personal experiences with GNOME and only reflect my very personal opinion too. People are free to reply on it or simply ignore it. But making some sort of mess out of what I have written is in no way acceptable. Specially when written by the same people using different fake accounts.

So far, while this account exists for quite a long time, this is my very first comment given under my nick and my real name here.

And for those who believe they know me, why don’t you take your chance and email me. Maybe I have something interesting to tell you. After all I was (and I still am) contributing to GNOME. Except some other stuff I’ve been fixing some gnome-mouse-capplet stuff quite recently. But I am a bit upset that GNOME (so my personal opinion) is in a really bad shape.

I don’t have problems with GNOME and their goal for world domination or whatever. But I have something against people wo don’t play fair. You need very good knowledge about GNOME (now not the architecture) but more of the internal function of GNOME as organ to understand what’s going on and what not. And I believe that the majority of the readers here don’t have a gripe of knowledge what’s going on. Why don’t you spent some time investigating into GNOME on your own. Learn the politics and not just the desktop.

Now after we all seem to have calm down a bit, why don’t you those who moderated my – basicly trivial – comments down, go and read them (at least for one time). Maybe the contents aren’t as invalid as you might have assume. Some people seem to have read them and do agree with me (even in this thread) and others even have moderated most of these comments up (if you’d at least would have spent reading them under the other link).

Please note that my primary comment was given to point just one link to an older article found here – and that was meant to be all of it. But after the first person has shown up calling me names, I tried to cut&paste over two comments of mine that I consider important. To show that calling people by names are a normal thing here – and sadly its also allowed here as it seems.

And yes name calling is a common thing for people to do who are out of arguments. It’s a common thing that – as soon as people don’t have arguments go getting personal.

Ok now you got my fair comment, you see my nick, my real name and my email address. For further stuff you can email me and tell me what you want. Maybe I can expect for once in a while to have people act a bit serious.

But you ought to control your temper, even thoug I perfectly understand it can be difficult.

About the modding up/down.

This is something which unfortunately is being abused in here. Some of my posts get modded up, for no apparent reason and other posts get modded down, for no apparent reason. Looks to me that some people har modding down just because they don’t like another persons opinion, no matter the amount of facts.

With that said, I have to disagree with you in many aspects, though I cannot say anything about your experiences in regard to contribution, since my time is spent on other projects (usually small enough for everyone to know eachother well).

2005-10-15 12:34 am

Respect to someone who’s prepared to put a lot of careful thought into his ideas, whether you agree with them or not. Like him, I like and use Gnome as my main DE.

A more frustrating concern in the state of Gnome generally. It doesn’t take much following of places like Planet Gnome or news of yet another Gnome “summit” to wonder whether anyone is in charge of the plot and prioritizing and organizing the work, or indeed even whether is is a plot at all.

As Linux moves more into the mainstream and the basic platform becomes more and more complicated, cocking around “hacking” and spraying around quick fixes and ideas just doesn’t cut it any more. I’d swap a robust and fully working Evolution or Nautilus for some window adjustments and yet another dubious but new! cool! mono-based utility any day.

I believe that GNOME uses the windows style order out of pure familiarity concerns at this point.

Probably right, strange they haven’t change that:-) Personally I don’t think the old windows order are the best usability vise. But people are used to it, and changing it will result in a rather heated argument.

I remember the heated discussion from when the KDE default changed, close on the left and help, sticky and min/max on the right(KDE2 beta 2 i think). The Laptop windows decoration with default button order, if you are curious. Besides don’t vista copy that one now? close on the left and double width for the important buttons.

You can change it even without third party tweaking tools you can use a bundeled app (gconf? I don’t remember exactly) to change the button orderposition. I personally like the OS X order myself but I’m primarily a OS X user.

2005-10-15 1:30 am

I have Fedora 4 installed. I often times have Nautilus crash when Gnome starts it up from a saved session. I have tried to remove Nautilus using yum and reinstall it but it still crashes occasionally. This problem kind of reminds me of IE on Windows 95 the way it would collapse when the system was started. Why does only Nautilus have this problem? Is it just me or are there issues with this application?

You might as well ask the same of the Enlightenment developers, or the developers of the various boxes, or any other environment people find useful. While the dream of one linux desktop might be a nice one, its about as likely as Microsoft giving up on Windows and working to better Mac OS.

2005-10-15 3:02 am

“They should discontinue the Gnome development and join forces to enhance KDE.”

Problem: Inactive window is raised as soon as the mouse button is pressed.

Use case: Adam is writing an email with Evolution and wants to add an attachment. He has an open Nautilus window containing the file, which is larger than the Evolution window (e.g. taking the whole screen). Adam now tries to drag&drop the file there, but cannot do this as the Nautilus window covers the Evolution window completely as soon as he tries. He has to move both windows halfway off the screen to do this.

Suggestion: Raise windows on mouse button up, not down. Maybe with additional refinements depending on the object you click.

Whatttt…can’t you do that in GNOME? I think you should be able to do it. In windows i can simply press alt-tab with other hand to bring the inactive window in front to drop the attachment or i can put the mouse window icon on taskbar (while holding the dragged item) and the window comes to front so that i can drop item on that.

2005-10-15 7:51 am

Or you simple drag whatever you want to the “taskbar” and hover over the evolution, wait a little, and voila it opens up and you can continue to drag. In fact, it works just like windows I see no reason what so ever to screw with settings people don’t want changed because they are very used to them and probably like them. It’s like the spatial natilus. I never want that, I promise you. I was extatic to find that you could keep browsing in the same window when I got win95 after being an avid Amiga user for many years prior. Do why would I want the old behavior brought back when I hated it so?

Same here, I rather see user education. Why not a “I’m learning mode” which simply pops up stuff like “If you want to switch to another app, do this” when the user drags around aimlessly? Much better than screwing with peoples settings and ways to work.

2005-10-15 5:16 am

Ok the situation here seem to have cleared up a bit and those who had dozen of fake accounts finally trashed all their modpoints. I feel sorry for having to use the axe method only to write my very own opinion about GNOME but well. It’s up to OSNews.com to solve the issues with abuse and mass moderation done by those with these fake accounts.

But now some further words about GNOME and why I think it’s so damn broken and why I believe that contributions alone don’t solve the issues.

The problem is not the contributions. The problem is getting those contributions accepted by the maintainers.

Over the years I realized that the request of contributions is just a poor excuse to avoid conversations with the developers or users who want something to get changed.

Some stuff in gnome-vfs for example was so utterly broken that it wasn’t touched for a really long time. There wasn’t even a maintainer for it (only a guy who kept putting some stuff in there whenever it was needed). Now some other people seem to have taken over the maintainance of it and the process continues.

But within the GNOME development team I found out (due to own experience) that it’s quite difficult if not highly impossible to get some ideas through or to convince a developer that a different approach would have been wiser or better. Not to say save a lot of time. But people kept using the broken components for years.

Even now not everything inside GNOME is sane or reliable and a lot of stuff seem to be reinvented over and over again. See DBUS for example or basic things like “specifications” as found on freedesktop.org. GNOME makes freedesktop.org sound like it’s a place for developers from GNOME and KDE to met and declare specifications but this is not always true since KDE had solved most of the necessary things that GNOME still urgently needs years before and their specifications and solutions are often by far better thought through and much more mature – and over the years proven that it also works practically and not just as concept.

For example you can compile KDE with a static prefix in say /opt/kde3 and later on you can move this entire directory to /usr/local/kde3 without the need to recompile anything. On GNOME we sill have the issue that every path is hardcoded inside the binaries so you can’t move the entire location if necessary. One of the bad concepts of GNOME.

Another bad thing about GNOME is that the developers do have nice ideas at time but they lack the power or durability to make the changes or visions they have complete. GStreamer for example is indeed a nice technology and it somehow made it’s path inside GNOME but still it doesn’t feel like it’s truly part of GNOME since some apps use it, others avoid using it and stick to xine. Now if these apps stick to xine then chances that GStreamer gets fixed and a whole part of GNOME is low.

Another thing is that plenty of the developers seem to have rotating focus on stuff. Today they work on this one, then tomorrow they focus on hacking on Mozilla or hack on ‘dead ideas’ they have that no one really takes serious so all the resources of working and fixing GNOME get’s lost with playground stuff.

We all know that GNOME was meant to be a corporate desktop. But then a corporate desktop needs different resources and a different approach. Serious project leading is required, strict guidelines are required, and people with brains to enable them.

It can not be (now that the HIG as guideline exists for some years) that applications developer still ignore it. I don’t care for third party stuff. But I do care for the important and key elements of GNOME software that should be a good example and follow these guidelines.

GIMP, DIA, Evolution, Abiword, Gnumeric only to name a few are in no way HIG conform. Some are, but others not. I filled in a bug for Gnumeric not long ago pointing the developer to the HIG v2.0 where it says that the Toolbar should obey the rules of Toolbar & Menus capplet (which is a core part of GNOME) unfortunately the bug was closed as not a bug and no further comments have been given to it.

Also printing is a necessary importand thing in GNOME imo and it can’t be that I load up GThumb to print a *.gif file and it ends up in printing a totally black picture on a white sheet of paper, wasting nearly 1/3 of my black ink cartridge.

It’s also inacceptable for a corporate desktop to have a document reader and viewer like Evince that prints a whole document correctly with correct fonts but as soon as I start printing one page out of it messes the fonts totally up (looks like monotype fonts when printed).

It’s the release team to take care of what they include inside GNOME, if the stuff is still immature or not working properly then it should by all means be avoided for inclusion since it doesn’t help anyone. GNOME is often claimed to be the desktop to get work done. But I often find myself to do more work in fixing stuff around GNOME rather than getting work done. Printing job applications usually ends the way that I switch into console and print over ghostscript using cups rather than trusting gnome-print or evince (which fault this is I don’t know but a confirmed bugreport exists).

As a corporate desktop I urgently require reliable tools and I require these tools today and not – one day. Look DIA, Nautilus, Evolution and many other tools exists for years now and DIA is nowhere to be usable and I often tried giving them a helping hand which I got ugly repsonses from the maintainers.

This does help the corporate idea how ? In no ways does this help anything. I do find the “Tango Project” and “Better Desktop” to be a nice thing but I somehow got the feeling that it’s just a reaction towards the plasma project that KDE offers.

Unfortunately in my opinion the KDE people do make a better figure with what they announce because most of the stuff they do works. Sure, not perfectly and sometimes you have quirks and other issues inside KDE as well but the tools exists to get work done. You don’t need to think about does it print correctly. It simply does. You don’t need to worry about Kivio or Umbrella not working correctly they simply do make a better shape than DIA for example.

KDE may look overwhelming complex and overloaded in the eyes of inexperienced people but in other peoples minds it looks just right and offers all the stuff one really needs without worrying.

I don’t say that these things won’t show up for GNOME one day but I can tell you from personal experiences that developing for GNOME is a nightmare.

As initially said you can easily move a final compiled KDE binary system from one dir to another and have the stuff work perfectly and perfectly find the datafiles. GNOME doesn’t offer that.

2005-10-15 5:32 am

The problem I have with GNOME is that it’s just a black hole of development. Sure, you can’t stop people from working on something, but GNOME never really seems to make a ton of progress like KDE. I’ve used both, and like GNOME, but KDE clearly has a plan and knows where it’s going. Also, read the various planets for both and you quickly realized the people at KDE are in it to make a killer desktop, the people at GNOME are more likely to be bitching about politics and other retarted stuff than working on a clear plan to make the desktop better. Christ, the folks at Ubuntu are doing more to make GNOME a modern, usable DE than the GNOME people themselves. It’s a mess, and it won’t change. It won’t die either, but the distance between it and professional DE’s being developed like KDE is just going to widen to the point where people won’t even talk about them in the same sentence any more. That’s GNOMEs fate, right there.

Ali, my biggest problem with your posting is that you’re repeatedly posting comments that have been cut and pasted either in whole or in part from other posts of yours that I’ve seen. This not only makes people weary from seeing the same thing repeatedly, it also bombards people with so much information that it becomes a pain to attempt to argue against you. So you simply get ignored.

I can understand you want your views heard and don’t like to see your comments disappear into the realm of modded down comments. However this is the wrong way to do it.

Why don’t you get a blog?

2005-10-15 6:20 am

The person posting from 84.129.228.0/24 is flagrantly in violation of the rules of the forum. He is definitely in violation of rule #7 (keeping things on-topic) since his postings are basically just a rant related to Gnome/KDE and have nothing to do with the original author’s specific list of issues. He is also obviously trying to revisit a flamewar that you guys already put to rest in accordance with rule #9. Additionally, even though you don’t have it listed as a numbered rule, but I can’t imagine that it’s allowed to post the same thing over and over again just to try to bypass the moderation system.

Please ban the netblock 84.129.228.0/24 either from the forum entirely, or at least from posting. Should this continue, I’d suggest just turning off anonymous posting altogether.

2005-10-15 7:57 am

Ah yes.. groupthink and modding down instead of replying to what looks like quite serious and valid comments is absolutely the right way. Wtf is this, the Holy Church of GNOME?

Expressing your opinions using exact events, and actually naming contributors, is not in violation of the rules as much as you might wish it would be.

We also seem to have a great deal of extremely sad people around here able to spend their time creating multiple accounts to mod down comments (and mod up meaningless ones) that make them squirm and flinch. Can you actually respond to some of the specifics (true or not), and keep your stuff on topic please without being less then juvenile?

A bunch of GNOME developers have scared away a lot of fine contributors to the GNOME architecture such as Star (long time artist for GNOME), Dr. Frickle (who initially maintained the old GNOME pages), Mr. Baulig (the guy who initially worked his ass off on libgnome/ui and other parts) and many others.

I am also a bit fedup about all the companies that have recently joined the GNOME foundation board. How comes that every company who shows interest in GNOME shows up as member of the GNOME foundation board ? Hell, every little small user who contributes to GNOME needs to pass the membership application, months passes, you get asked dozen of questions….But how comes all these new companies join in as if they were part of GNOME for the past 6 years or longer ?

Hmmm. Blocking dynamic IPs is not very helpful. These IPs belong to a major ISP. AFAIK the next IP will not be restricted to 84.129.228.0/24. You can’t block it completely.

> Should this continue, I’d suggest just turning off

> anonymous posting altogether.

Maybe that would help. Although I know a forum that did that and is extremely troll-ridden anyway.

2005-10-15 9:03 am

This is sad…

Instead of commenting on the original article, now we get this stupid, childish discussion with someone repeatdly posting the same message (we call that flooding in my hoe town and it gets an inmediate ban, no matter the reason) and some others bashing him?

Is there a possibility to close comments on a certain article in OSNews? I mean, I don’t really care who’s “right” or “wrong” or whatever, it’s the situation in itself.

Problem: Inactive window is raised as soon as the mouse button is pressed.

Use case: Adam is writing an email with Evolution and wants to add an attachment. He has an open Nautilus window containing the file, which is larger than the Evolution window (e.g. taking the whole screen). Adam now tries to drag&drop the file there, but cannot do this as the Nautilus window covers the Evolution window completely as soon as he tries. He has to move both windows halfway off the screen to do this.

Suggestion: Raise windows on mouse button up, not down. Maybe with additional refinements depending on the object you click.

I don’t know to what extent this is possible but if the MIME type associated with the draggable object contained enough information that the application could deduce what the appropriate action is then one could simply drag the object and drop it on the target application with the window list located in the panel.

For example- evolution can only natively open certain file types, evolution does not natively deal with DOC files-so if a MIME application/ms-word object was dropped on evolution in the panel window list evolution concievably be able to deduce that this is an attachment for the currently opened email or open a new email with the object as attachment.

This idea is, for me, a logical extension to being able to drag documents from the desktop and drop them on the associated application icons on the top task bar. If you append ‘%U’ to command line in the .desktop file (accessible via ‘properties’ from the icon on the panel) the application will be launched displaying the object you dropped on the icon.

Drag and Drop is an amazingly powerful approach- but their is tremendous inconsistency in it’s implementation and this has lead people to assume, for the worse, that such functionality is simply not present.

– Drag&Drop saving

Problem: It is possible to open files by drag&dropping them into the application. It is not possible to save in a similar manner.

Use case: Berta is working on a long project that has a complex file structure. She has a Nautilus window open showing “~/Documents/Project/Version A/reallylong/butnecessary/path/texts/” She has a word processor window open with a text she wants to save into that folder. Despite having exactly that folder open, she has to navigate there again in the save dialog.

Suggestion: Add an Icon to the save dialog. Dragging that icon into a file manager window will save the file there , using the specified file name.

Again I would use drag anddrop for solving this problem. My suggestion would be to simply have an icon present in the ‘Save File/Save File as’ dialog, with the corresponding MIME-type as the to-be-saved document and allow for one to simply drag the icon from the dialog to wherever one wants(ie. the desktop, a folder on the desktop or an open nautilus window). Upon drop the item the file-save dialog would simply close.

As far as hiding the directory structure goes a ser should really only have to see those directories and files which they can deal with- ie. which have ownership/permission corresponding to the actual user. If I launch nautilus as root I should have acess tro everything-but as a user I should only see those directories and files to which I have *access* to. a ‘.hidden’ may be a good way to handle this but the logic is already present in the file choose and in nautilus to discern which ownership/permissions a file/folder has and this could fairly easily be used to dynamically hide that to which I, as a user, have no access.

– “Open Location” Dialog

this is simply a bug and not a feature

– Links break spatial

spot on. nautilus window size/position/display mode information should apply to both the original and the link…..

– Icons on Desktop that *aren’t* on Desktop

I agree with the author but I also why this isn’t so simple- any application which uses gnomevfs should be able to access any dynamically created desktop folders and icons-but applications which do not use gnomevfs are not aware of such files/folders- in some cases, ie. if it is a local mount of local device, setting a link to the desktop is no real problem-provided that the link is dynamical created and destroyed upon mounting and unmounting the device. But if the files/folders are located elsewhere and only accessible through various protocols (sftp, web-dav etc.) this solution simply cannot work. Unfortunately we do not have a vfs system which adequately bridges both the command line(and apps, which do use a desktop vfs system like gnomevfs or kde-ioslaves, are effectively command-line apps) and the desktop. Fuse is now part of the vanilla kernel and work could be done to integrate this into gnomevfs to create a nearly universal vfs system-but Fuse is Linux specific and GNOME runs on multiple different systems….

– Middle click in browser mode

Another bug….not a feature

– Calendar applet

spot on. another inconsistency-should be easy to fix.

– Cancel in “Add to panel” dialog does *not* cancel

this is just silliness- there was some work going on prior to gnome-2.12 to implement an alternate view, more of an overview, of the various panel applets. I don’t know which version actually got used in Breezy, but I also have the permanently greyed out back button here in Gentoo- it seems like they got half way through the process of changing the dialog and just stopped….As for undoing ‘add to panel’ actions- I doubt it would be easy to simply ‘undo’ several such actions in one shot- I am sure at the programming level these are discrete actions…..

I agree with your comment on rubberbanding- this would be really nice.

– File selection with Mouse & Keyboard combination

Thank you very much for pointing this out-this has irked me mutliple times in the past and is quite frustrating. shift-click and ctrl-click should *not* be mutually exclusive operations- only when taken together do they become the powerful selection tools that we want.

I would also love to see the file-chooser allow for this kind of selection activity and I really wish work could be done to make it more visibily obvious whether one is selecting a file or a folder in the file-chooser- some programs use this file-chooser to allow you to import a folder of files-but the visual representation of this action is quite confusing….

And an additional observation:

Bug-buddy has 2 prominent bugs

1) the file-chooser option when saving the bug report is totally confusing due it’s misuse of the file-chooser-are we selecting a file which already exists? are we creating a new file ? are we selecting a folder ? -visually no way to discern the action at hand

2) well I finally decided to send GNOME a bug report- and what-do-you-know Bug-Buddy only supports sendmail or dumping a plain-text report in a file. Gee why not include evolution support ?

2005-10-15 9:26 am

I do use Gnome and to me it’s fine overall (switched from KDE as of v.2.8), but 84.129.228.— guy cites a lot of valid points. Even if it’s copy/paste, why reformulate things every time? I, for one, have never read these two “rants” from him, though I do recall somebody with oGALAXYo handle here. I’m definitely against banning him. Please refute his points if you can. If you don’t mod him down, he won’t post that much 😉

2005-10-15 10:31 am

And, do you know what the really funny part is? The response to his “rants” and “ravings” actually so far does little more than confirm a number of them… But I guess that’s too subtle for them.

I use OS X and Windows, my gnome/kde experience goes back to the year 2001/2002 and prior to that, enlightement…

I have ‘tested’ some Live CD linux distros and even installed a Fedora, Suse and some other on an almost dead hard disk, just for the sake of doing it.

If what the original poster and the modded poster said is true, the gnome is really having several usability problems.

KDE looks more like Windows (afaicr), but it used to behave correctly; compared to “my world” (Windows, OSX). Gnome looks cool, but I remember having problems with copy-paste not working sometimes, and ‘little stuff like that’. When you add a lot of “little stuff” you get a problem “joe user” won’t know how to fix.

My 0.02¢.

2005-10-15 12:16 pm

Although usability issues are a problem to me the larger problem is real hardware support. For example, I have an HP all-in-one scanner. After learning how to set it up, and spending an hour hacking with FOSS drivers it seems to work well.. but everytime i plug it into my laptop i wonder “Is it going to work this time?” I’m always more suprised when it DOES work without tweaking then when it doesn’t. Sometimes the scanner is recognized, sometimes it isn’t. This is a huge problem.

This isn’t just my specific scanner this applies to most hardware devices that are more complicated than a mouse. Yes, it’s fun to hack away and get stuff working but when I need to print out something on my way out the door I don’t have the time.

Having said that, device support _IS_ getting better, but real vendor support is the key. The applications on Linux are fine for 90% of the PC market, but until you can go to dell.com or hp.com and buy a machine that is 100% linux supported it’s more of a problem than a poorly written dialog box.

I’m sure some will say go to linuxcertified.com – but check out the reviews of their machines. Even the ones that they sell specifically for linux have many hardware/driver issues.

Is a usability nightmare, metacity is so lame in the way it handles window positions, I feel like sticking a fork in my eyes so I can’t use a computer anymore

Just try and use Gnome with two large lcd’s or a new wide screen lcd and see how long before you feel the same way.

I won’t even bother with all of its other shortcoming, they have been beaten to death for far too long now.

And what’s worse, is soon as someone say’s somthing derogatory about Gnome, the comments are modded down or you’re ridiculed to death or called a troll.

Wake up you Gnome Devs, you’ve been sitting on your fat arses patting yourselves on the back for far too long. It’s about time you actually did something constructive like actually make Gnome uasable without feeling you need to stick a fork in your eyes!

Oh and it’s about time Totem was either sent to the depest, darkest, depths of hell or actually made to play a media file! – It’s 2006 nearly, my phone can play movies better and its only 2 months old

Wake up you Gnome Devs, you’ve been sitting on your fat arses patting yourselves on the back for far too long. It’s about time you actually did something constructive like actually make Gnome uasable without feeling you need to stick a fork in your eyes!

Maybe they’re sitting around patting themseles on the back because of the happy gnome users like myself. And obviously there are lots more of us that are pretty happy if we’ve developed this vast secret conspiracy to strike down any negative views of gnome found on the internet. heh…

Either that or you’ve got yourself in the attitude of seeing everything through some spectacular rose-tinted glasses. And no, there can’t be that many of you considering that you’re using consistently the second most popular open source desktop.

if we’ve developed this vast secret conspiracy to strike down any negative views of gnome found on the internet. heh…

That would be many of the developers.

2005-10-15 7:32 pm

And no, there can’t be that many of you considering that you’re using consistently the second most popular open source desktop.

You actually believe those internet polls? Wasn’t there a poll here some months ago that suggested GNOME was actually more popular.

Sorry, you can’t use that old chestnut I’m afraid. What are we supposed to believe?

Wasn’t there a poll here some months ago that suggested GNOME was actually more popular.

It was an OSNews one, and it really was useless. The poll was only open in parts of the world for very short periods of time, and was shut extremely fast. It wasn’t like the desktop consortium one which was open for months, is a lot more stricly conducted and which KDE won convincingly. You’re going to have a fairly hard time trying to seriously skew that one I’m afraid.

2005-10-15 9:59 pm

I see. So you choose which internet poll you decide to believe. Don’t believe the osnews poll. Believe $my_favorite_poll.

Just try and use Gnome with two large lcd’s or a new wide screen lcd and see how long before you feel the same way.

I’ve been using GNOME in a Xinerama setting every day for the past two years, and it works fine. I find the Metacity window placements excellent, and the only issue I have is that Nautilus opens new windows straddled across the monitors. What problems have you had?

2005-10-15 4:53 pm

The problem is not the contributions. The problem is getting those contributions accepted by the maintainers.

Over the years I realized that the request of contributions is just a poor excuse to avoid conversations with the developers or users who want something to get changed.

Some stuff in gnome-vfs for example was so utterly broken that it wasn’t touched for a really long time. There wasn’t even a maintainer for it (only a guy who kept putting some stuff in there whenever it was needed). Now some other people seem to have taken over the maintainance of it and the process continues.

But within the GNOME development team I found out (due to own experience) that it’s quite difficult if not highly impossible to get some ideas through or to convince a developer that a different approach would have been wiser or better. Not to say save a lot of time. But people kept using the broken components for years.

Even now not everything inside GNOME is sane or reliable and a lot of stuff seem to be reinvented over and over again. See DBUS for example or basic things like “specifications” as found on freedesktop.org. GNOME makes freedesktop.org sound like it’s a place for developers from GNOME and KDE to met and declare specifications but this is not always true since KDE had solved most of the necessary things that GNOME still urgently needs years before and their specifications and solutions are often by far better thought through and much more mature – and over the years proven that it also works practically and not just as concept.

For example you can compile KDE with a static prefix in say /opt/kde3 and later on you can move this entire directory to /usr/local/kde3 without the need to recompile anything. On GNOME we sill have the issue that every path is hardcoded inside the binaries so you can’t move the entire location if necessary. One of the bad concepts of GNOME.

Another bad thing about GNOME is that the developers do have nice ideas at time but they lack the power or durability to make the changes or visions they have complete. GStreamer for example is indeed a nice technology and it somehow made it’s path inside GNOME but still it doesn’t feel like it’s truly part of GNOME since some apps use it, others avoid using it and stick to xine. Now if these apps stick to xine then chances that GStreamer gets fixed and a whole part of GNOME is low.

Another thing is that plenty of the developers seem to have rotating focus on stuff. Today they work on this one, then tomorrow they focus on hacking on Mozilla or hack on ‘dead ideas’ they have that no one really takes serious so all the resources of working and fixing GNOME get’s lost with playground stuff.

We all know that GNOME was meant to be a corporate desktop. But then a corporate desktop needs different resources and a different approach. Serious project leading is required, strict guidelines are required, and people with brains to enable them.

It can not be (now that the HIG as guideline exists for some years) that applications developer still ignore it. I don’t care for third party stuff. But I do care for the important and key elements of GNOME software that should be a good example and follow these guidelines.

GIMP, DIA, Evolution, Abiword, Gnumeric only to name a few are in no way HIG conform. Some are, but others not. I filled in a bug for Gnumeric not long ago pointing the developer to the HIG v2.0 where it says that the Toolbar should obey the rules of Toolbar & Menus capplet (which is a core part of GNOME) unfortunately the bug was closed as not a bug and no further comments have been given to it.

Also printing is a necessary importand thing in GNOME imo and it can’t be that I load up GThumb to print a *.gif file and it ends up in printing a totally black picture on a white sheet of paper, wasting nearly 1/3 of my black ink cartridge.

It’s also inacceptable for a corporate desktop to have a document reader and viewer like Evince that prints a whole document correctly with correct fonts but as soon as I start printing one page out of it messes the fonts totally up (looks like monotype fonts when printed).

It’s the release team to take care of what they include inside GNOME, if the stuff is still immature or not working properly then it should by all means be avoided for inclusion since it doesn’t help anyone. GNOME is often claimed to be the desktop to get work done. But I often find myself to do more work in fixing stuff around GNOME rather than getting work done. Printing job applications usually ends the way that I switch into console and print over ghostscript using cups rather than trusting gnome-print or evince (which fault this is I don’t know but a confirmed bugreport exists).

As a corporate desktop I urgently require reliable tools and I require these tools today and not – one day. Look DIA, Nautilus, Evolution and many other tools exists for years now and DIA is nowhere to be usable and I often tried giving them a helping hand which I got ugly repsonses from the maintainers.

This does help the corporate idea how ? In no ways does this help anything. I do find the “Tango Project” and “Better Desktop” to be a nice thing but I somehow got the feeling that it’s just a reaction towards the plasma project that KDE offers.

Unfortunately in my opinion the KDE people do make a better figure with what they announce because most of the stuff they do works. Sure, not perfectly and sometimes you have quirks and other issues inside KDE as well but the tools exists to get work done. You don’t need to think about does it print correctly. It simply does. You don’t need to worry about Kivio or Umbrella not working correctly they simply do make a better shape than DIA for example.

KDE may look overwhelming complex and overloaded in the eyes of inexperienced people but in other peoples minds it looks just right and offers all the stuff one really needs without worrying.

I don’t say that these things won’t show up for GNOME one day but I can tell you from personal experiences that developing for GNOME is a nightmare.

As initially said you can easily move a final compiled KDE binary system from one dir to another and have the stuff work perfectly and perfectly find the datafiles. GNOME doesn’t offer that.

2005-10-15 4:55 pm

… which means there are certain things that are just “there”. The author proposes some kind of sick Mac OS X II which I’d hate to see. Mac OS X in itself is a sick creation and I don’t want another beast like it. Sorry, most of these suggestions are pure crap. There are a few points worth thinking about but generally speaking his suggestions are for the trash can.

2005-10-15 5:49 pm

yes well we could make gnome idiot proof, but then there is always the one idiot that is more idiot like than the rest…. sorry, learn how to work and use your computer that will solve a lot of the issues you mentioned….

I dont see this as anything but nitpicking and as soon as these are fixed someone will just find other things to nitpick….doesnt interest me at all…

When all of them give the same results, time after time. And not to forget mail polls done by magazines showing the same. One can’t but wonder if it’s something in it, and remember it’s never small margins between them either(something like 2 to 1).

Wasn’t there a poll here some months ago that suggested GNOME was actually more popular.

Yes, and that poll was heavily manipulated given the timeframe it was run, unintentionally or not. Suddenly closing of after a short time, just when KDE side had gained momentum and nearly overtaken Gnome. That’s a well known fact some people tend to ignore when bringing it up.

2005-10-15 8:24 pm

Yeah, people people could also argue the other polls are equally heavily manipulated.

How? Oh right, yer. People just make up those results and draw those bar graphs themselves without anyone noticing, or people just vote fifty times each so no one will notice. If you’d actually read the guidelines for the desktop consortium poll you’d know that hasn’t happened. *sarcasm* Mind you, I’ve noticed that the people running it are really partizan KDE supporters….. */sarcasm*

Yeah, people people could also argue the other polls are equally heavily manipulated.

Right, for more than 5 years people have manipulated absolutely every desktop poll ever made(except one, where someone else was faster to do it). That’s rather reasonable, should have consider that option.

But now things get rather of topic, let’s try to get back on track.

The list from the article raised a few valid arguments, except those with the filesystem nonsens. About half of the issues actually looked more like real bugs to me, and not actual usability issues. That said, how has the Gnome developers responded? Which of the issues on the list are already fixed or targeted for fixing? What are acknowledged as real issues and whats denied?

2005-10-15 10:08 pm

Everyone knows that while spatial desktops create a lot of window clutter, they have their advantages. I’ve always wanted to have the option to have parent windows automatically close when I’m opening a folder, so I can browse to a folder and not have to remember the cumbersome key combination for close parent windows.

Maybe even in the future with Cairo the parent could morph into the child on screen, it would be a super neet effect.

I see. So you choose which internet poll you decide to believe. Don’t believe the osnews poll. Believe $my_favorite_poll.

You are a really funny Anonymous. The thing is $my_favorite_poll=(all public polls ever done on the subject)-the osnews poll. Anyway get someone with statistic 101 or some common sense to explain it to you.

2005-10-15 10:28 pm

And all these public “internet” polls are statistically accurate, Prof? I still don’t believe people who read osnews are gullible to internet polls. I guess I learn something new everyday.

And all these public “internet” polls are statistically accurate, Prof?

Given the large number of different polls, and that they show rather similar results. Indicate rather heavily that they represents an accurate sample of the target audience. Or prof of the existence of some large scale organized effort to skew all the poll results.

I guess I learn something new everyday.

And if you make a habit out of accumulating information from several sources and correlate those, while you apply some common sense and well known facts. Rather than making up your mind in advance you will learn even more.

2005-10-16 12:20 am

Geezaz, when trying to make “informed” judgements on statistical measurements, you need to ensure your sources are not only credible, but the variables one is measuring can not be easily manipulated. I’m sorry, saying polls on the internet show KDE is the most popular DE is like believing in those weight-loss commercials. And where are all these polls? People say a lot of crap on the internet. What’s next, “internet studies have shown that bread causes cancer.”

Let’s comprehend a few things here. Why does KDE consistently come up as the #1 used desktop environment in online polls (although I agree that they’re not always accurate etc). Why are there more KDE based distros than Gnome ones? Or, why, when a distro offers both Gnome and KDE, do they consistently choose KDE as the default?

The KDE “licensing issue” that most Gnome users whinge about is nothing to worry about imho. Corporate users can still use KDE on their corporate desktops. However, if they wish to make customised stuff, to integrate with the KDE desktop, then they have to buy a trolltech license. I fail to see the issue with this.

Let’s look at this from a slightly different angle – you own a hardware company, say, manufacturing mice. You want to use the “windows certified hardware” logo, so that your brand is deemed to be totally compatible with Microsoft Windows. Do you realise how much you have to pay Microsoft for that honour? Microsoft has set their operating system up, so that if you’re installing a manufacturer’s hardware, it prompts you with the “you’re not installing cerfified drivers, it may cause issues with Windows” etc. What a load of bollocks! However, it confuses many users, who frequently would panic and cancel the install, thinking something was going to be broken. Do I hear people bitching about this issue? Nope. Then stop friggen bitching about the KDE issue.

Dave

2005-10-16 12:58 am

However, if they wish to make customised stuff, to integrate with the KDE desktop, then they have to buy a trolltech license.

no, they don’t have to buy anything

they need a license only if they plan to redistribute what they have written. if they keep their software inside their organisation, they can do whatever they want with Qt/KDE without paying a cent

it’s the gpl!

2005-10-16 1:03 am

Let’s comprehend a few things here. Why does KDE consistently come up as the #1 used desktop environment in online polls (although I agree that they’re not always accurate etc).

Because online polls are inaccurate, skewed and unscientific. Sheesh, that’s what people have been trying to say all day.

Because online polls are inaccurate, skewed and unscientific. Sheesh, that’s what people have been trying to say all day.

Try reading some of the comments and using your brain then. If you have a lot of online polls, and one in the desktop consortium poll that is on for months, and the results have been the same for years, it’s actually telling you something. What are KDE fanboys doing? Voting fifty times each, which they can’t do in stuff like the desktop consortium poll because people would definitely notice? Where’s the evidence of Gnome’s share of the userbase?

Personally I’m u Gnome user, but I acknowledge the fact that KDE is no. 1 in popularity and Gnome no. 2 (in Europe that is).

However. It seems to be reverse in USA with Gnome as no.1 and KDE as no. 2.

But this is all statistic, and we all know that there are:

1) Lies,

2) Damned lies,

3) Statistic.

Personally I use Gnome, because it’s the more OO desktop and the one closest to the experience from OS/2. Other people are used to the desktop working differently and so they use something else than Gnome or they are configuring Gnome differently.

Spatial browsing is something I really don’t like. Other people cannot live without it. And all I’m waiting for is proper support for D’n’D (especially in regard to printing).

And put up with some very poor losers that visit the osnews.com website and actively mod down posts that they disagree with. I’d suggest some of the pro Gnome users actually read the osnews.com guidelines for modding. And then learn to curb their trigger happy fingers and cease modding down posts inappropriately – merely disagree with a post is no means to mod it down.

And what you say got nicely prooven by those same losers, when they went on a down moding spree just now.

I can mod you up if you want, or we can let it stand as it is showing how correct you were:-)

You obviously cover your ears and whistle a happy tune, because there’s no poll out there that will tell you what you want to hear.

He certainly does, but not whistling I think. More like a spoiled child covering his ears and shouting his chant contrary of what he is told, with some “I cant hear you” thrown in. You usually encounter the kind near the candy section in shops, with parents wearing a painfull expressions. But most kids stops this kind of behavior when they get older. Obviously not all.

My favorite when it comes to the polls are Linux Journal’s Readers’ Choice Awards. It’s not even a web poll, you have to vote by mail. This quote from 2004 sums it up nicely:

For several years now, KDE and GNOME have finished first and second, respectively, with an ever-increasing distance between the two. This year, KDE received two votes for every one GNOME received.

2005-10-16 2:28 am

You know, if you guys would simply shut the hell up about which desktop got more votes, there wouldn’t even be a flame war right now. It doesn’t even matter in any real sense.

As for you people claiming it’s anti-anti-Gnome sentiment causing your posts to be modded down, get the clue. You are being modded down because your words aren’t doing anything but fueling the fire of another pointless flame war. Doing so is specifically cited in the rules as a reason that posts shall be modded down.

The admins need to ban the people starting these flame wars rolling (clearly, oGALAXYo in this case) instead of allowing this stupidity to continue unabated.

…and just a reminder, if someone’s talking about a particular feature of one desktop or the other, it is not necessary to talk about how much better/worse someone else’s implementation is. Either it’s better than it was in it’s last release, or it’s not. That’s what matters. This post was supposed to be about a particular user’s problem list resulting from their examination of some software–instead, I think I might actually be the first person in the entire thread to seriously mention it.

Actually it was anonymous persons who started the flaming and trolling.

oGalaxyo only came up with a link and got modded down immediately.

Then he lost his temper and kept reposting (he explained this and has said sorry – good enough for me) and the anonymous in here kept attacking him, with support from people not exactly known for their clever suggestions.

I disagree with oGalaxyo in most issues, but there was absolutely no reason what so ever to mod his posts down.

I’m a Gnome user (and Fluxbox and Windows user and OS/2 and Amiga (though the latter only in emulator)) and happy for it. Some are KDE users and happy for it (KDE does have a couple of sexy tools IMO).

It’s sad that this thread ended as it did, but blame it on the abusers of the modding point system.

2005-10-16 12:14 pm

You clearly don’t know oGalaxyo/Ali.

He’s been on that “troll flamefest -> sorry won’t happen anymore” loop for years now. He’s got no credibility at all.

He’s slandered gnome board members and developers, insulted people that answered him in good terms and then acted outraged because he was identified and labeled as a madman. His rants about his reputation being damaged because of a supposed sect of anonymous users are legendary now.

And people still fall for the “I’m modded down before being read! I’m being oppressed!”. Bizarre.

Moderation abuse? Perhaps. But try to read it at -5. It’s a gigantic Ali rant filled with posts from other news with slight changes. Looks like this abuse is benign.

He’s been on that “troll flamefest -> sorry won’t happen anymore” loop for years now. He’s got no credibility at all.

He’s slandered gnome board members and developers, insulted people that answered him in good terms and then acted outraged because he was identified and labeled as a madman. His rants about his reputation being damaged because of a supposed sect of anonymous users are legendary now.

Give his concerns a straight answer then. If you can’t it does not reflect well, does it?

As for you people claiming it’s anti-anti-Gnome sentiment causing your posts to be modded down, get the clue. You are being modded down because your words aren’t doing anything but fueling the fire of another pointless flame war.

No. What do you think your post is? You’re not addressing any of the issues or answering any of the comments of anyone else. You’re just whinging about banning people who you cannot give a straight answer to.

The admins need to ban the people starting these flame wars rolling (clearly, oGALAXYo in this case) instead of allowing this stupidity to continue unabated.

No. He was expressing his opinions and experiences, and those have gone unanswered except for whinging “mod this down” posts like yours.

As for you people claiming it’s anti-anti-Gnome sentiment causing your posts to be modded down

The modding of morgoth’s post clearly prove that claim to be true so…..

What should be baned are Anonymous postings, demanding little accountability for ones postings. As for oGALAXYo, he is something of a special case as he always gets modded down on topic or not. But he stands for his comments, and that’s more than can be said of others.

This post was supposed to be about a particular user’s problem list resulting from their examination of some software–instead, I think I might actually be the first person in the entire thread to seriously mention it.

Wrong, several others has too, but for the most part they got either modded down or ignored.